SNOHOMISH — With a tale 100 years long and counting, it’s difficult to know where to begin.
Perhaps it’s in 1903, when a family of German immigrants, the Rehwinkels, built a sturdy, charming farmhouse near Bickford Road.
Or maybe in the late ’70s, when a vivacious, petite Oklahoma woman settled down to live in the area and took a job at Boeing — not as a clerk but, at her insistence, as an airplane mechanic.
Better yet, this story will begin in 1996, when the charming farmhouse and the saucy Oklahoman first crossed paths.
It was a warm summer afternoon, and 50-year-old Sue Moyer happened by the abandoned farmhouse while looking for barn wood to make garden furniture.
Past a big "For Sale" sign, the gate to the farm was open — an invitation.
She poked around for a bit and decided to call a local developer to get the scoop on the farm. The man told her everything on the land was scheduled for demolition to make way for a business park and self-storage units. But the house itself was available.
Moyer’s wheels began turning.
The next afternoon, she took her daughter, Brooksana Raney, and Raney’s young daughter Samantha to see the house. They found an open window, and the three of them climbed through.
"You’d have thought we’d broken into Fort Knox," Moyer said. "We were creeping around and whispering … we were breaking and entering!"
The women were surprised to find the house worn but spared from vandalism. It had been three years since the death of its last inhabitant, Leo Rehwinkel, who was an infant when his parents and siblings moved into the house in 1903.
It was there in the house, while watching dust particles float in the filtered sunlight of an empty room, that Moyer decided she wanted to move.
Move the house, that is.
"If you can look beyond it and see beyond broken windows and the lack of paint and the fact that it was 90 years old … it just made good sense to me," she said.
Developers gave her the house for free, and she started making the arrangements to have it relocated at a minimum cost of $17,000 to some property she had recently purchased.
"It’s pretty remarkable that I went into it and three days later it’s mine, gratis," she said.
Moyer and her daughter took "everything that wasn’t nailed down" from the land around the house, Raney said. They took large granite foundation rocks for the new yard. They took barn wood. They dug up plants.
Six weeks later, in a torrential downpour, the house was on its way home. It took dozens of workers all day to move the two-story, 23-ton house three miles down the road.
"She walked along with it the whole way," her daughter said.
When the house arrived at Moyer’s Skipley Road property, it was turned backward and hoisted up on four sides by railroad ties that looked like Jenga blocks, her daughter said.
Moyer spent nearly every day of the next seven years working on the house — "taking it to the studs," then tirelessly restoring its historic country glow.
On a shoestring budget, Moyer bartered, traded, bought and sold.
Her friend and fellow Snohomish Garden Club member Darlene Huntington found a claw-foot tub for the house and gave it to Moyer for her birthday. Huntington left it in Moyer’s driveway with a big red bow and a card that said "Happy Bath Day."
Moyer says her network of home and garden buddies are like organ donors for houses.
"Reusing and recycling — it’s a state of mind," she said.
Moyer painted the interior of the house with 35 gallons of free paint from a recycled paint store.
She went to auctions, secondhand building supply stores and swap meets.
Then there were the bloopers common to nearly every do-it-yourself home improvement project. Moyer has fallen off ladders. She has slipped, landing headfirst in carpet glue. She tried to install a toilet and got the trademark spray of water in the face from a loose pipe.
Moyer had 10 pairs of glasses floating around the house while it was under construction— one for each project area — and usually one pair on her head. And sometimes she still couldn’t find one of them.
"You know what they say, man plans and God laughs," she said.
Still, Moyer and a faithful team of workers and friends exhaustedly and delicately put the pieces of her rescued house together.
"My goodness, I could have built a new house for what I’ve got in this," Moyer said. "But would it have felt like this? No."
Saturday, Moyer threw the farmhouse a 100th birthday party to thank all those who helped her along the way, to share with Snohomish a part of its history and to show her neighbors she’s "not nuts."
"People thought I was insane. Here I am a little old lady just out for a lark," Moyer said. "I know they were just looking over here going, ‘Oh my God, it’s an Okie! Pretty soon she’s going to have goats tied up.’"
Now her farmhouse is a three-story home. Inside, carefully chosen antiques help the house look its age.
Raney, Moyer’s daughter, calls it the "primitive country" look. In the kitchen, pots are hung overhead on an old barn ladder from the Rehwinkelfarm.
Chickens and guinea fowl roam free throughout the yard, and "if they’re limping" are sometimes allowed inside.
Because she’d "rather garden than mow," patches of flowers and plants fill the front yard and will soon circle the house. In the back, giant windows boast a 180-degree view of the flats around the Snohomish River and the cities and mountains beyond.
"It looks like it’s always been here," Moyer said.
At the party Saturday, some descendents of the Rehwinkel family paid a visit to Moyer and their ancestors’ home.
Tacoma resident Bonnie Rehwinkel, 76, settled into Moyer’s living room with a cup of punch. She was married to John Rehwinkel, nephew of Leo Rehwinkel — the house’s last family owner.
"I’m so glad there’s somebody that likes old houses," she said.
Her son Rob and his wife Marsha of Graham brought her up for the party.
"I think it’s great," he said. "She did a really great job and kept the concept of the house. It’s better than having it destroyed."
The word destroyed doesn’t seem to exist in Moyer’s vocabulary. It’s rather full up with words like heritage, restore and flatlander.
Moyer still is enraptured with the Great Plains of her youth, and tries to go "home" to Oklahoma every summer, where she "shops it up like crazy."
She’s a pint-sized woman who packs a punch, listens to classical music, talks to perfect strangers in elevators and likes the way the back of a chicken’s neck smells.
For years, her nephew Tim Sorensen has described his aunt as a woman who "goes to swap meets and buys antique trunks just to open them and smell the old air and read the old newspapers inside."
Her daughter said Moyer has always had vision and a knack for making things beautiful. She can look at a project and see its end result, even if it’s not apparent to anyone else and she doesn’t necessarily know how to get there, Raney said.
Moyer’s sister, Teri Sorensen of California, gave Moyer some Lincoln Logs a few Christmases ago, urging her to go with "littler projects."
On the tail end of the undertaking of her lifetime, Moyer may tend to agree.
"I hope God doesn’t send me another big project," she says. "I don’t suppose I could do it."
The story of Moyer and her "Karma farm" is far from over.
There will be laughing and drinking on Thanksgiving for "anybody who doesn’t have a place to go."
What Moyer has done, her daughter said, proves that there is a difference between a house and a home.
The lessons of Moyer’s story are at least twofold.
"New is not always better," Moyer said. "Where I come from, it’s not unusual to move a house. They weren’t so disposable. And it wasn’t 3 or 4 acres of lumber to build me a new house."
And women — even women who are 4 feet 10 inches tall in their shoes — should not be intimidated by power tools, lumberyards, plumbing or carpentry.
"We’re not talking about brain surgery here," she said. "If some guy can do it, I can do it. Certainly, there are people who are more adept. But I’m surprised more women aren’t pretty good at this kind of stuff, because we’re able to see beyond. After all, we’re women."
DAN BATES / The Herald
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